On Halloween night in 1941, a group of high school kids burn down a church. Frosty Summers is willing to do anything to be part of "the gang." Not until she puts her feet into the Pacific Ocean does her awakening gives her strength to lose everything to stand against that gang.

Can this be a little longer?

The Water And The Blood
(ReganBooks/HarperCollins2001)

Rare is the gift of a writer who is able to conjure up the voices of very different worlds, to give them heat and power and make them sing. Such is the talent of Nancy E. Turner. Her beloved first novel, "These Is My Words," opened readers to the challenges of a woman's life in the nineteenth-century Southwest. Now this extraordinary writer shifts her gaze to a very different world -- East Texas in the years of the Second World War -- and to the life of a young woman named Philadelphia Summers, known against her will as Frosty.